Homer and the Epic

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Preface

The Homeric question, the question of the unity of authorship, is a literary problem, yet attempts are constantly made to solve it by other than literary' methods. Here arc two poems : does each bear the mark and stamp of a single authorship, in harmony of tone, in a preconceived catastrophe to which all tends, in dramatic consonance of character, in grandeur of style ? These are matters of art, but they are often approached, not in the spirit of art, but in that of a cross-examining barrister, or of an historical student testing the accuracy of a statement of facts. The habit of minute analysis, as Signor Comparetti says, produces a mental short-sightedness, and Homeric commentators see the mote immensely magnified, but have no eyes for the beam. They pore over the hyssop on the wall, but are blind to the cedar of Lebanon. They pick out, or invent, blemishes all but invisible, discrepancies which must exist in every fictitious narrative, and they regard these as only to be explained by diversity of authorship, and by the redacting, patching, and combining into a mechanical whole, of lays, fragments, and mutilated epics wrought by many hands in many ages.

This method, we ar^ue here, is erroneous, tt has its origin in the ailments of Wolf against the possible existence of a long continuous early Creek epic. These arguments led men to look for the traces of joins in the poems, and to find them, to hunt for the resulting discrepancies, and to discover them. But U'olPs a priori arguments, we try to show, are no longer valid. It is not impossible that a long early Greek poem might haie been composed, and might survive. This being so, we plead for wider and more generous views of the Iliad and Odyssey, for a study of poetry as poetry, not as a dubious clause in a Bill, or a doubtful statement by an historian.

In one way the prevalent literary taste is adverse to a correct judgment of Homer. It is plain to every reader that long narrative poonis are now out of fashion. In all English literature only four or five long narrative poems are widely read, if even they are widely read. The Faery Queen, Paradise Los/, Scott's Lay and Afarmion, and Don Juan. Our taste is such thatjEdgar Poe denied the existence of such a thing as a long poem ; there are only moments of poetry, he said, in a mass of verse which is unpoet]Cal.| It is this kind of taste which makes Wilamowit^ Moellendorff obsene, about the author of the Iliad, that ' if he made the Fatroeleia, or the .Mri-n, he was a great poet, but if he made our Iliad, he was a L^ickpiHt— a botcher.' '

Xow, with all admiration for the critic's great learning, research, and brilliance, he seems here to be simply stating Poe's paradox in a concrete form. The remark would apply as well to Milton, Byron, Scott, or Spenser, not one of whom is always on the level of his best passages, w hich ' Hem. Uitttrstuk., p. jSo.

PREFACE ix alone, in Poe's theory, deserve the name of poetry. But Homer lived in an age, whatever that age may have been, when long narrative poems were in vogue. His generation, his audience, were not at the point of view of Poe and Wilamowitz. They did not cry

and deny that the drowsy passage was by the true Homer. We must read him as his audience listened ; we must not pore over him with microscopes. That is our argument, though we try to show that even the discoveries of microscopical criticism have less importance than the microscopists imagine. Into the linguistic question, the supposed lonicising of an ^olic epic, the author has not ventured to go. It is a matter for experts in language, not for the mere literary student.

As far as this problem of language affects the other problems as to the original home and time of the epics, whether in continental Greece, or on the coast of Asia Minor, whether before or after the colonisation of the Asiatic shores, the author is inclined to agree with Mr. Leaf in his introduction to his Compatiion to the Iliady and with Mr. Monro in his paper on Homer and tlie Early History of Greece,"^ That is to say, the poems, or the bulk of them, were first sung in continental Greece, Argolis, Thessaly, or Boeotia, before the founding of the colonies on the other side of the ^Egean. It is pleasant to be able, in spite of our total difference as to the composition of the Iliad, to agree here with Mr. Leaf. As to the question of one author or many authors, the question of the unity of the Iliad, we are never likely to convert each other. If there be here and

* Historical KevieWy No. i, 1886.

there a needless vi\'acity in our attempts to answer his a^uments, we would say, with Euryalus,

To the Provost of Oriel, Mr. Monro, I must here express my thanks for his kindness in reading my proof-sheets. I almost doubt if I should name him, ' pour ne lui point donner une part de responsahilite dans les fautes que je suis seul coupable d'avoir laisse subsister.' ' But every reader who detects an error will know that I only am responsible. Nor is it to be assumed that Mr. Monro agrees with all the views expressed. On the matter of the tenth book of the Iliad, for example, we are not at one : though I have no great confidence in my attempted defence of its originality.

I have also to thank Mr. Edmund Gosse for examining what is here said about the Northern lays and the Volsunga Saga, assistance most valuable to one who only reads the Sagas in translations. Mr. A. S. Murray and Mr. Cecil Smith have, with unwearied kindness, imparted to an amateur some inkling of archaeology. The gem engraved on the cover, which seems to represent an Achaean Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig, is from a gold ring published by MM. Furtwaengler and Loeschke in their work on Mycenaean vases. The part of the discussion of the Iliad which deals with book xvi. appeared in the Natioaat Revieu-', and most of the chapter on ' Homer and Archaeology ' in the QuarUrly Retinv. The author has to thank the conductors of these periodicals for permission to reprint his obsen-ations here.

' Gaston Paris, La Lill/ratuit Franfaitt tut .l/ejv* ./j,«, p. vl

Contents

CMAKreK

I. Homer's Place in Literature .

II. Introduction to Wolf

Chapter I Homlrs Place In Literature

In an age full of other, and othenvise pressing, questions, it may l>e held that the Homeric question should be allowed to go by ; that Seneca was right when he said life was too short for it, that we should dally no longer with this ancient (fordian knot. It is not practical, it does not affect the well-l>eing of society. We can read Homer, if we choose, without asking when he lived or where were * his city and they that begat him,' or whether, indeed, his name is not a noun of multitude, and his poetry a collection of elegant miscellanies. To this we must answer that, whatever the urgent practical problems and distractions of an age, men of letters are enlisted to keep flying the colours of the highest literature, of all that makes and records the flower of civilisation. Pessimists may prophesy that our public oratory, far unlike the elaborate rhetoric of Louvet and Robespierre and Vergniaud, will decline into mere bandied abuse. They may frighten themselves by a vision of our poetry seeking the Fountain of Youth in the idioms of the costermonger and the dialect of Cokaync. Even were there good grounds for these apprehensions, are we not engaged

B

IMPORTANCE OF HOMER to maintain, as best >ie may, the ever new and fresh love of what is old and excellent, the admiration of that divine poetry which, during three thousand years, has been the delight and the consolation of the world ? Now, though the poetry abides unaltered, the conditions of its readers are eternally changing. We cannot study Homer as Xenophanes did, or Socrates, or Nero, who died with a Homeric Hne on his lips, or as Eustathius did, or as Pope and Boileau did, or even as Wolf or Lachmann studied him. New knowledge keeps coming in, knowledge drawn from the records of Oriental empires, from comparative study of customs, from the graves of the royal dead in Mycenae. New theories are raised, prevail, and fall obsolete : we have often to ask ourselves where we stand in our knowledge of the Bible of Cireece.

To forget Homer, to cease to be concerned and even curious about Homer, is to make a fatal step towards a new barbarism. Mankind exists, or should exist, not to live only, but, as Aristotle defines it, to live nobly. A noble and enjoyable life demands an imaginative |)articipation in all that the human race has done, or said, or thought, which is excellent. The outcasts of Poker Flat, in Mr. Bret Hartes tale, consoling their last hours with the story of Asheels, in Pope's Iliad, were living a nobler life than the comfortable citizen, who reads newspapers, and nothing but newspapers all day, and wakens with a fresh appetite for his morning journal. To keep up, to diffuse, as far as we may, interest in the best literature, is the dutvof all who have been educated and called to this task.

Inopportune as their endeavours may seem, their work is like that of the copyist monks in the Middle Ages. They, too, were out of harmony with their age, but they were working for the age which was to come. If, in the future, an age of general well-being is to arrive, its children

HOMER AND SHAKSPEARE will turn, as all men who have the opportunity must, to what is best in human art, to the literature of (Greece. It is our business, in our degree, to applaud and to elucidate it, to clear it, if we can, from doubts and erroneous theories, to see it as it is, and as it was in its origins, to keep reminding the distracted age of those Islands Fortunate sleeping in the ocean of times dead and gone.

In the front of all poetry stands the i)oetry of Hellas, and in its foremost rank stand the epics of Homer. If we were offered the unhappy choice whether we would lose Homer and keep the rest of Clreek poetry, or keep the rest and lose Homer, there could be little doubt as to our choice.

We would rescue the Iliad and the Odyssey. How much and how invaluable the remainder is, we know. The stately tragedies, the immortal comedies, the triumphant odes of Pindar, the pictures of hill and glade, river and well, and the pastoral life in Theocritus, the passion and patriotism of Sappho and Simonides, all the mirth, the love, the laments of the Anthology, would be known and heard no more. But as, if a similar choice were put before us in English literature, we should keep Shakspeare, and let SjKMiser and Shelley, Scott and Wordsworth disappear, because Shakspeare in a sense includes them all — includes the romance of Keats, and the speculation of Wordsworth, the humour of Scott, and his delight in l)attlc includes the flower of all lyric melody, every mood, and all thought— so Homer includes, in essence, the sum of all (ireek poetry. It is a whole world, with all its possibilities of joy and sorrow that lives in the Iliad and Odyssey. The tragedian avowed that his own plays were only * scraps from the great Homeric banquet.' The funereal wails of Meleager in tlu- Anthology are present already in the half lyric laments of Andromache and Helen over Hector slain. The figures of

4 homer's rillLOSOPHY

Eros and Aiitcros arc here, in the noble affection of Andromache and Hector, in the shameful, the repentant, the agitated i)assion of Paris and Helen. The solemn thoughts of human fortunes, and the justice of Heaven, which .Kschylus lK)nders l)eside the Titan's l>ed of |>ain, on the rocks of Caucasus, are already meditated by Homer. His Ate, which blinds men, his .Kgisthus and ClytiKmnestra, who draw down sorrow beyond their doom, his fate, which controls both mortals and gods, Homer's reflections, in the Odyssey, on the lot of man, * the most unhappy of all creatures,' his stoical conclusion in the resolute valour of Hector and Odysseus, anticii)ate in simple terms the results of all later speculation. Already the problems are stated, and the Homeric answer is given in the words of the Lycian Sarpedon, * Ah, friend I if once esca|)ed from this Ixittle, we were for ever to Ix: ageless, and immortal, neither would 1 fight myself in the foremost ranks, nor would I send thee into the war that yieldeth men renown ; but now — for assuredly ten thousand fates of death do every way beset us, and those no mortal may escape or avoid — now let us onward ! ' Zeus has given to man an enduring mind. The tides of mortal fortune must come and go. (treat llios must i»erish on its day, the city of Priam of the ashen bpear. * Hut now, since 1 have heard the voice of the goddess, and luuked upon her face, 1 will go forth, and her word shall nut be void. And if it be mv fate to die beside the ships of the mail-clad Achaeans, so would I have it ; let Achilles slay me with all speed, when once I have taken in my arms my son, and have satisfied my desire with moan.'

We too, in Homer, see the face and hear the voice of the goddess, of the Muse, and are heartened to go forth and meet our destiny. The philosophy of Homer, simply as his problems are stated, is fortified against all vicissitude. His mind, like the mind of Herodotus is constantly occu-

HIS VIEW OF LIFE 5 pied by the thought of change, how the ancient city must fall, and fall, too, must its conqueror, slain on his own hearthstone in the full fruition of victory. Nay, the very civilisation of which Homer sings, with all its valour and art and gold, is to go down before the assaults of the Dorians. His Achilles is the type of triumphant youth, but of youth with sheer doom before its eyes. To him

*One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name'

His eyes are open from the first, and his choice is made. This, then, is the philosophy of Homer, and to what other l)etter philosophy have the schools of three thousand years brought their disciples? It is for this clear vision, this lucid insight into the ultimate questions, that Greece chose Homer for the master of masters, the teacher of all philosophers, * the first of those who know.*

His theor)' of life might thus be called melancholy. Even at home, after all his wanderings, the curse of the sea god yet, hangs over Odysseus, his troubles are not over, he mu.st set forth again into the unheard of lands. 1'horc is no continuance of mortal happiness, *hcre we have no abiding city,* but against this Homer docs not repine. With his clear vision of the end of all living, he combines the gladdest enjoyment of life. To him the world is full of joy. Storms, and snow, and sea, the ruinous rains, the noisy torrents that divide the hills, the eyes of lions, the peaceful piping of the shepherd, the murmur of man and maid from rock and oak-tree, the woven tlancc, the tribunal, all the arts ofshi|)-building and sea-craft, of weaponforging, of chariot-building, of gold work, of weaving and embroidery, all the life of peace, of the chase and the festival and the song, all the life of war, ambush, and siege, and march, clashing of shields, and countering of chariots, all is alike dear to him, all makes part of the eternally

6 LIFE IN HOMER

moving, the eternally abKorbing spcclactc. His wotli-a-day world is on ever)- hand environed with the divine, as the refluent stri-ani of Oceanus j-irdles the earth. The gods appear in tteautifiil !<ha|)cs of young men and humrtss maidens ; in the unsailed seas, the untrodden isles, the goddess bums her rragmnt (ire, and sings her magic song, as she weaves at the immortal loom. Kverythiiig is full of {HtssiliilitieK, evcrj- atbenturL' tempts him, whether here he meets the courteous and clement Egyptians, by the river .■flgyptus, or there the cannilia! I^slrjgonians, by their fiord in the land of the midnight sun. This world that is so hard, this life that must end in death, are yet rich in the lieautiful and the strange. Man's days arc wealthy in works and deeds, he is a warrior, a counsellor, n hunter, a shipwright, a sntith, a mower in the fields of hay, a ploughman Iwhind the steers.

This is life, as Homer paints it, life cheered by women as fair as the heroes are bold, ladies loyal, staunch, wise, lender and true, fit males for the heroes. AVbcn the men are dead in latlle and eaten of dogs, before the women lies the day of captivity, ' to strew another's bed and bring water from another's well," but the hour is their own.

Thus Homer takes all exixricnce for his ])rovince, in his similes he gives us idylls, 'little pictures' of jiastoral or hunting days encounters with lions, adrentures in the mountain mists, wars with the sea waves for home and for dear life, lal>our in evcrj- kind, sketches of children, liuildin;; houses of sea sand, or clinging to their mother's gown, and crying to l>e taken up in her arms. He has humour, too, as in his pictures of the squabbles of Olympus, the spctchcs of Thersites, the arrogance of the wooers, the girl in thought about her wedding day, the easy luxurious I'ha'acians. 'His lyre has .all ihe chords '—now the triumphant .\cha;ans, Ix'aring Hector dead break into a p^eaii, now the women

THE ART OF HOMER shrill the dirge, as even yet tliey do in Corsica. 'I'he epic is thus the sum of all poetry — tragedy, comedy, lyric, dirge, idyll, are all blended in its great furnace into one glorious metal, and one colossal group. Another style of composi tion Homer offers us, which nowhere else we receive from Greece, till we get it, in decadent though still beautiful shape, in (ireece's dying age. 'i'he epic, in the Odyssey, becomes a romance, the best of all romances, and the most skilfully narrated. No later tale can match, in sheer skill of composition, wMth the Odyssey.

This is not all. The epics are not only poetry, but history, history not of real events, indeed, but of real manners, of a real world, to us otherwise unknown. The heroic and sacred poetry of other peoples, as of Vedic India and of Finland, goes back into the years before history was. But the Vedas have but little of human interest, the Finnish Kainvala has no composition, and is merely a stitching together of disjointed lays of adventure, or of popular songs. The Iliad and the Odyssey, keeping all the fresh vivacity and unwearied zest of * popular' poetry, are also masterpieces of conscious art. Homer does not wander in a poetic chronicle along the ages, or all through a hero's career ; he seizes on a definite moment in the Siege of Troy, a set of circumstances centring in one heroic passion, or he tells a clearly circumscribed tale of Odysseus' return. Many peoples have heroic lays, or poetic chronicles of legendary events. ( Greece alone had a poet who could handle these with the method of a master. We readily see how Homer can rise above his time, while remaining true to his time. His age, though rich in minor decorative arts, had no accomplished statuary. The poet could not inspire himself from sculpture. On the other hand, it is his description of Zeus that inspired the colossal work of Phidias in a later day. The statues he knew were probably rude ancient

8 HISTORY IN HOMER idols, covered with sacred rol)es. But when he describes Athene arming, we see the polished Ixxiy of the (loddcss, the gleaming armour, the immortal raiment, *as in a picture.' It is thus that Homer rises al)Ove the age whose ways, whose arms, whose ships, whose chariots, whose golden cups, and necklets, and ornaments of amber he paints so firmly. He tells -us plainly of a civilisation far advanced, when women were honoured and listened to as the equals of meii though they were ceremonially purchased in wedlock. It was an age when religion, apart from mythic and scandalous anecdote, was comparatively clean. AVe hear of no foul rites of purification with pig's blood ; the Mysteries, with their mingling of the lewd, the barbaric, and the sublime* are never the subject of an allusion.

The Gods do not make love in the guise of eagle and ant, of dog, and swan, and bear, as in the mythology of a later and more cultivated time. The worst moral stain on later (Ireek character is never mentioned even in a hint. In many ways. Homer's age is divided from the historic age by a great gulf, and much of the Homeric .social excellence was never revived by pagan Greece. All this is histor)', of a kind, and, but for Homer, all this would have been for ever forgotten.

'i'he relics of his own, or of a yet earlier period, which the spade has revealed at Mycenre and elsewhere, would l)e indecipherable if the epics had not sur\-ived among the ruins of many civilisations. This gives another charm and value to Homer, in addition to his poetic worth. This makes his poems a yet more priceless and unique possession of humanity. His own age cherished them, and they escaped in the fall of the Achaean empire. I^ter (ireece adored them ; Rome received and imitated them ; the Middle Ages took them from Rome in the shape which Virgil gave them, and in curious penerted tradition. Even

HOMER IN LATER TIMES ancient Ireland had its own singularly altered version of the Odyssey. The Renaissance woke to the enjoyment of Homer, Petrarch dying with a copy of the book which he could not read in his hands. Homer l^came more than ever what he had always been, the moster and teacher of poetry. Faint and distorted echoes from him had inspired Chaucer, he had been the guide of \'irgil, who, again, was the guide of Dante. With the renewal of (ireek, he came forth into the daylight, though it was rather a revival or avatar of his genius than the knowledge of his works which gave inspiration to Scott. Not till the French Revolution, and the storm of changed opinion which blew with it, did scholars seriously doubt whether there had indeed been any Homer, and seriously try to think that his magnificent unity of thought, of style, of manners, was the result of a congeries of atoms, the work of many minds, in many ages. These questions have not injured Homer; nay, they have stimulated to a more constant study of his |x>ems, and have kept interest in them alive. The ages of Anne and Louis XIV., in spite of the translation by Popc^ and the defence by Boileau, had little of the Homeric spirit. A more general, a more vivid appreciation of him was excited by the very causes which impelled Wolf to criticise him, namely by the revived love of romance and of old popular poetry. Meanwhile the question as to whether Wolfs doubts are justified, is the matter which this book, in its degree, tries to discuss. Thus far we have spoken of Homer as we speak of Shakspeare, taking pride in so great and delightful a triumph of a single human spirit, listening in wonder to one lyre of so many various and harmonious chords. But our triumph must pass, and only our wonder remain, if the Homeric poems, their music, their pictures, their consistent philosophy of life, are to be explained as a mass of old and new, of interpolations, ot lO DOUBTS ABOUT HOMER do vctai lings, of essays by rhapsodists and ' diaskeuasts/ Achaean minstrelsy, and Ionian imitation, all combined, no man knows how or by whom, offered to Greece as the work of a single artist, and accepted, by the jealous and isolated communities of Cireece, for what they pretended to be. Certainly our wonder abides, and is greatly increased, if this literar)- miracle can l)e established, in a world where miracles do not hapi)en. If there were so many great poets, almost all so much alike, all with one theor)* of life, all with one knowledge of manners, institutions, arts, and of the world : if, despite these congruities, they lived in different epochs, in different states ; if their effusions could be combined into the epics, and if all (Ireece could be i)ersuaded to accept the combination as one artist's work, then miracles after all do occur.

In discussing the possibility or prolmbility of these ideas, we shall l)egin, where the Homeric question, proi>erly speaking, commences, with a statement and criticism of Wolfs famous Prok^omena, We shall then examine the composition of the Iliad, and of the Odyssey, taking for chief texts the conclusions of Mr. l^af, in his excellent edition of the Iliad, and the latest German criticism. Next we shall consider the archaeological theories of Homer's date and civilisation l)ased on recent discoveries. We shall then com|)are Homer with certain other early national poems, such as the Chanson de Roiand^ the Kaleivahiy and Bemvulf^ trying to show in what respects his work resembles, and in what it transcends and differs from, these interesting lays. We shall then state the conclusion to which we have Ikxmi guided by the whole process—namely, that the Homeric epics, in spite of certain flaws, and breaks, and probable insertion of alien matter, are mainly the work of one, or, at the most, of two, great poets. Their place in literature has already lieen defined, they contain the voice of a whole lost world, they are full of

UNITV OF HOMER II

the prime vigour of the Cireek genius, and may be accepted as the sum, in an early and vigorous form, of all that the (jreek genius was able to accomplish. What all ancient literature offers us, namely the sense of living a more opulent life, enriched by sympathy with a life s{)ent under widely different conditions of society, climate, knowledge, and religion. Homer, by virtue of his antique date and perished civilisation, offers yet more abundantly. He communicates to us the common thrill of humanity ; for his men face, in other guises than ours, the same problems as we — the eternal problems of death and life, of war and |)eace, of triumph and defeat, of pleasure and pain. Our own sense of vitality is thereby in a measure increased, and, as it were, there is a kind of transfusion into our veins of the heroic blood, of the vigour in the liml)s of the sons of (lods. Even if we doubt concerning our portion and lot in the future, by the knowledge of Homer our share in the past is secured, and we arc made conscious partakers in his heroes' immortality, sharers in the joy of all who have loved him, of Archilochus and Virgil, of Plato and (loethe. In this, there is a truth more than rhetorical, and in this joy an inalienable possession. As men, after all, are so made that they desire to be grateful for a poem to a ])oct a sentiment of which Longinus appreciated the generous enjoyment — and not to a vague SiKicte des Gens de Lett res, it is hoped that the argument may help to strengthen the belief in one author, not in a college of collaborators, and so may add, however slightly, to the pleasure taken in the Iliad and Odyssey. I^'or it does not appear to us that the question of the single or the composite authorship of the poems, is of no rcsthctic importance, that the epics are just as excellent whether they be the work of one genius, or a patchwork, a mosaic of different pieces, derived from different ages. In that case, much of the poems must be sham antiques, the manners must have been arti-

12 POETS AND PROFESSORS ficially reconstructed by minstrels who did not live in the world of the earlier lays. The characters will not have been conceived by one master genius, but Achilles will l)e in origin the creation of one mind, Odysseus of another, Helen of a third ; and many other poets must have adroitly kept up the unity of characters which they did not invent or create. Thus we have to allow for at least two Achilles's, the second acting in direct contradiction of the character of the first, according to the separatist theory. We can never be sure that some new poet is not making a hero act as his first creator would not have had him act ; we may l)elieve that the original poet, had he foreseen the future, would have killed all his personages, as Addison killed Sir Roger de Coverley to keep him out of the hands of Steele. We have seen, in late days, attempts to continue Coleridge's ChristaM and the greatest novels of Dumas. These efforts are egregious failures, hence we more distrust the hypothesis of Homeric continuators, working throughout several centuries. Where we have been wont to admire the unity of one genius, we are now asked to ceasure 'diaskeuasts,' editors, younger ix)ets, and to grope among a perfect Almanack of the Muses. If these criticisms he correct — if the original poet of the Odyssey, for example, never dreamed of the hero's adventures among the wooers, and his meeting with the old hound Argos — we cannot but feel our confidence shaken, and our pleasure turned to pain and bewilderment. This is no argument in' favour of shunning analysis ; * the truth must be sought at ' all costs,* but it is not certain that the truth, when found, will prove to l)e disenchanting. About Homer it is just possible that the Poets may be right, and the Professors may l)e ^Tong,*